How to Write a Cover Letter in 2026: Nail It or Skip It

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How to Write a Cover Letter in 2026: Nail It or Skip It<br>If you want to relocate with a job, a good cover letter can help you get there. This is how a reader did it.

Andrew Stetsenko<br>Jun 09, 2026

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I want to start with the rule, because the rule is simple. In 2026, a cover letter is worth writing only if you write it well. An average one is the least effective message you can send.<br>So… in 2026, what does it mean to write it well, you might ask?<br>I am writing this around a real letter. One of our subscribers here at The Global Move wrote a cover letter that opened a door for him, specifically at Ecosia, the German search engine that plants trees while earning revenue. He gave us permission to show it. I blurred the names of the people he mentions, but the rest is exactly as he sent it. I want to walk through it with you, the parts that work and the parts I would change, because the result was real, and that is what makes it worth studying.

The cover letter I’m studying, with the names of the people mentioned blurred.<br>Why writing something long stopped meaning anything

A few years ago, writing a cover letter took real work, and so did writing a long email. The effort itself was the signal. A colleague who reads The Global Move once got sent abroad to pitch the business, even though that was not his role, and he is convinced he got it because he read the brief carefully and wrote a very long email laying out everything that had to happen. The length proved he had done the work. That signal is gone in 2026. Writing something long no longer proves effort. At best, it proves compliance, and it can work against you. Copy and pasting a chat into a cover letter is a bad idea, and so is sending three paragraphs that just reword your resume.<br>You have seen designers complain that AI design all looks the same now. The same thing is happening to cover letters. When everybody uses the same prompts, every letter reads the same, and the value of writing one drops to zero. This is older than LLMs. Before cover letters became a commodity, if you googled what to say in an interview you got the same answers as everyone else. There was even a Heineken ad built on the joke between saying “I’m passionate” and saying “I’m stubborn.” Same concept. If you sound like everyone else, you do not stand out, and length no longer costs you anything, so it no longer earns you anything. (If any reader can send me that Heineken ad, I’d love to watch it again.) Which brings me to the main point here:<br>For your cover letter, either you nail it, or you skip it.

So if you are going to write the cover letter, write it well. Since this is the start, let me lay out what a modern cover letter is built to do. A strong one demonstrates three things. First, your expertise and experience that are relevant to this role. Second, the meeting point between that expertise and the value you can create for the company, and it lands harder if you can point to real numbers. Third, deep and personalized research that shows a genuine interest in this specific company and sets you apart from a generic application.<br>If you are waiting on a recruiter to reply, let go of the idea that the letter has to be long. Something short and well-thought-out, that fits in a single screen, will almost always do more for you.<br>Set one objective when you write it. You want the recruiter to want to talk to you . You want them to read it and reach for the keyboard, to reply or to set up a call, even when you are not the right fit. The best sign is an honest “thank you for applying” that was clearly written by hand and not fired off by an automation. If you get that, you’re on the right track!<br>So aim past “keep it short.” Short is good, but the real question is whether the letter is compelling. Did you touch a nerve? Did you speak to the pain a recruiter carries, or the goal the company is chasing? If you can fit that into a few short paragraphs, the way the Ecosia candidate did, you did it right.<br>I made a similar point in our post on how searching for tech jobs with relocation will look in 2026. Playing the numbers game is fine. The spray and pray approach, where you send the same generic application everywhere, is not that good, though.<br>PostHog says the same thing in their own hiring advice, and it is worth reading in full. They keep the letter short, they tell you not to reword your resume, and they show real examples of the cover letters that led to hires at PostHog and the ones that did not. That side by side is pure gold.<br>The Global Move is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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